Every few weeks, somebody different climbs into the No. 25 Ram.
One weekend it's Tony Stewart. The next it's Travis Pastrana. Jamie McMurray has driven it. Clint Bowyer has driven it. This Saturday at North Wilkesboro it belongs to Ryan Newman, the Rocket Man himself, who won 13 of his 18 Cup races in a Dodge and is climbing back into Mopar sheet metal like no time passed at all. Conor Daly gets it at Indianapolis. It is the strangest ride in the Truck Series, and it might also be the smartest.
Here's the thing. Ram is back in NASCAR after a 13-year absence, and it did not come back the way manufacturers usually do. No sprawling Cup program. No poaching a superteam. Ram's return runs through the Truck Series, built and run by Kaulig Racing, the one organization in the entire garage that competes with no manufacturer technical alliance and no partnership with a Cup team, plus a rotating "Free Agent" seat that turns the No. 25 into a weekly guest spot for anybody with a name and a helmet.
On paper it should not hold together. A year in, it mostly does.
Look at the everyday roster and the plan comes into focus. The No. 12 belongs to Brenden "Butterbean" Queen, a late-model kid out of Chesapeake who leads the Rookie-of-the-Year standings and already owns a CARS Tour win at North Wilkesboro. The No. 14 is Timothy "Mini" Tyrrell, who won his ride on a reality show and, more to the point, was the youngest driver ever to win a Late Model Stock race in America. The No. 10 is Corey LaJoie, a third-generation racer. The No. 16 is Justin Haley, a Cup winner at Daytona who has won in all three national series and led a race-high 20 laps in Kaulig's Ram debut before the fuel ran out on the final restart, one of several near-misses the Ram trucks have banked, Lime Rock included. That is not a collection of also-rans.
And that is the point. Kaulig didn't buy a truck team off the shelf. It built one out of short-track talent and one rotating marquee seat, which is exactly the combination a returning manufacturer needs: cheap, fast, and loud. The rotating No. 25 keeps a famous name in the headlines every single week. The full-timers develop real drivers on real bullrings. And the whole thing runs through the one team nimble enough, and independent enough, to move without asking a Cup partner for permission. The same isolation that makes Kaulig an underdog in Cup makes it the perfect skunkworks in Trucks.
North Wilkesboro is where the theory gets tested. This is a 0.625-mile oddity with a downhill frontstretch and an uphill backstretch, a genuine short track that hosted the Trucks back in 1995 and 1996 and only returned to the schedule in 2023. It rewards the things money cannot buy: seat time on a bullring, restart nerve, a feel for a place. Everything Kaulig stocked its trucks with, in other words.
Newman is the perfect avatar for the whole operation. He won a 50-lap modified race at North Wilkesboro during the track's 2022 revival and called it one of the most memorable of his career. Now he is back at the same place, in a Ram, for a brand he made a fortune winning with two decades ago.
"It's special returning to a brand I had so much success with early in my career," Newman said, "and racing at Wilkesboro is always cool."
Cool, and calculated. A year ago Ram was not in NASCAR at all. Now it has a rookie leading the Rookie-of-the-Year race, a highlight reel of famous names cycling through a single truck, and a weekend at one of the most storied short tracks on the calendar to show all of it off. No wins yet. But for a program that didn't exist last summer, the results are running louder than the odds.
The FaithFest 250 runs Saturday at 12:30 p.m. on FS1. Watch the No. 25 for the famous name. Then watch the No. 12 right behind it, because that's the one the whole plan is really about.